by Marc Cameron
The Capitol Police had decided it would be prudent to assign a four-man detail.
Kathleen, sitting in the passenger seat, gushed over the fact that her husband warranted protection. She’d always been a little heady with power and prestige-ever since he’d been the editor of the college newspaper at Arizona State. Dumber than the box of proverbial rocks, she’d been fiercely devoted to him from the moment he got her into a game at the Sun Devil Stadium with his press pass.
He looked over at her with a contained smile. She was three years his junior, and her pale skin showed none of the pressures and anxieties of leadership that lined his brow like a washboard. He had to admit she was attractive in a stolid, hackneyed sort of way. She spent an hour on the treadmill every day, watched what she ate, and doted on him as though he were the last man in the world. Even worse, she believed every word that came out of his mouth. Men and women alike would often tell him how lucky he was to have such a wife-beautiful and devoted.
They passed under the gray shadows of the Memorial Bridge; Lincoln sat on his throne to the left. Thousands of dead lay in Arlington Cemetery to the right. Drake passed a rusted Ford pickup belching blue smoke, and then eased back into the right lane. He shot a soft look at his wife. She rarely ever said no to him-but even steak and eggs for breakfast got tiresome after a while.
He eased back into the left lane.
“I’m excited to spend some time in New York,” she said, hands folded in the lap of her peach-colored dress. It suited her complexion and overly sweet temperament.
“Seems like a bad time to me,” he said. “I should swing by the office and pick up some papers. We’re running early and I’ll only be a minute.”
“Hart,” she said sighed. “I’m so proud of what you’re doing, but can’t you take this one night off and just enjoy the wedding? There are going to be so many important people there.”
“This move that you and I are taking,” he said, looking across at her. “It’s the single biggest thing we’ve ever done, Kathleen.” He’d learned a long time before that if he wanted her buy in to something, he just had to talk about it as if it was a joint project between the two of them. He studied the tiny lines around her trusting brown eyes and wondered if she’d feel the same way if she knew how he felt about Julia Sanborn’s legs.
He didn’t love either one, but at least Julia was exciting. Kathleen was not a bad person; she was just boring. He’d admitted that to himself shortly after they’d met in college. But her father had the contacts in local politics to help him get started. Kathleen was far from homely and had produced two strong, healthy sons. She was, more than anything, comfortable.
His heart fluttered in his chest as he they shot past the sign announcing Reagan National Airport ahead. The Potomac River stretched off to their left. To the right was the Roaches Run Wildlife Sanctuary lagoon, a long tidal pond built when the city fathers had been dredging gravel to construct the Pentagon. The sight of it sent a shiver down both legs.
Pressing on the accelerator, he looked at his wife again, studying the tiny hairs on the nape of her neck. She didn’t deserve the lot he’d dealt her…
“Hart, why are you driving so fast?” she said, wringing her hands. “You’re scaring me.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “My mind was elsewhere…”
He clutched the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white.
“Shit!” he spat, swerving into the right lane to miss a slowing furniture truck.
Kathleen was thrown sideways by the move. “Hart, slow down!”
“I can’t,” he said through clenched teeth. “The brakes are gone.”
Behind them, the dark blue Suburban wove in and out of traffic, struggling to keep up. A line of traffic lay a quarter mile ahead, slowing almost to a standstill. Drake cut the wheel sharply to the right, skidding the BMW sideways. He jumped the curb and careened down the grassy embankment. Drake aimed the long black sedan between the largest trees. Thick brush scraped and clawed at the sides of the car. Saplings the size of Drake’s wrist slammed at the undercarriage, hewn down by the momentum.
They hit a small rise before the water, launching them into the air in a long, agonizing arc. The BMW hit the water in the vehicular version of a belly flop, slamming Drake and his wife hard against leather seats. Air bags deployed from the dash as well as the sides, pinning them backward.
Stunned by the sudden impact of the fall, Drake struggled to make sense of up and down. Frigid green water rushed into the car. The half-deflated air bag confused him and made it difficult to locate his seat belt. Pockets of air hissed and gurgled as the car settled with astonishing speed toward the bottom of the gravel lagoon. He knew he needed to get free, but he couldn’t get the stupid air bag out of his face. He hadn’t counted on the air bag. He had a job to complete…
Water covered his chin and then his mouth. In a moment of panic, he screamed for Kathleen, blowing a volley of bubbles and wasting precious air as the lagoon invaded the last bit of space inside the sedan.
As always, she heard his call and came to him.
Fighting her way past the flaccid air bag, Kathleen Drake reached for her husband’s lap and popped loose his seat belt. The eerie glow of the dash lights played off her auburn hair as it floated around her face. She tugged at his arm, pulling him toward her open door and safety.
On the way out, he spotted the shimmering silver bubble of an air pocket in the corner of the car, near the sun visor. Holding tight to her hand, he pushed upward, gasping for a lungful of air before ducking back down beside her at the door. Her tugging grew more frantic as he braced his feet on the car’s frame, holding her down.
The water wasn’t more than seven or eight feet deep and the surface beckoned.
He drew her close, smiling in the near darkness. She smiled back, trusting him completely. Grabbing a handful of hair, he slammed her forehead over and over against the exposed doorpost, before shoving her back into the passenger seat. A flurry of bubbles erupted from her mouth, forming a silent O of shock and terror.
Lungs on fire, Drake held tight to the frame of the car. Kathleen tried to claw her way past, eyes wide, pleading. He kicked brutally at her face and chest, forcing her to stay inside the car. A thin trickle of bubbles streamed from the corner of her gaping mouth as her struggles ceased. He ducked back inside for one last frantic look. She could not survive now that she knew.
He had nothing to worry about. She floated peacefully, arms outstretched as if to embrace him. A thin trickle of blood trailed from her broken nose in the murky green water. Brown eyes gaped open, staring directly at him as if they’d always known his secrets.
Drake broke the surface gasping and choking. Two members of his protective detail had worked their way down to the water’s edge and stripped off shoes and suit jackets to dive in after him.
“Kathleen!” he sputtered and croaked in what was hardly an act as he tried to catch his breath.
A black agent named Norton pulled him into the shallows and passed him off to a partner before sloshing into deeper water to go after the woman they called “The Missus.”
“We’ll get her out, sir,” he yelled over his shoulder before diving into the blossoming circle of bubbles.
The athletic young officer surfaced a short time later with Kathleen in tow.
Sirens wailed forlornly in the distance as Drake stood on the bank shivering with someone else’s suit coat over his shoulders. The four members of his Secret Service detail worked frantically to revive the sodden lump of flesh that had been his wife of over twenty years.
For one terrifying moment he thought Norton might succeed in bringing her around. In the end, the earnest officer looked up in between rescue breaths and gave a solemn shake of his head. Water dripped from the end of his nose. He kept up his efforts but knew it was over.
Drake fell back against the grassy bank, landing on the seat of his pants. His protection detail would assume he’d collapsed out of g
rief for his dead wife. Instead, a wave of nauseating relief flooded his shivering body. Events had fallen perfectly into place. Driving off the road had been more exhilarating than he’d imagined. As an added bonus, he’d lost his dear wife. No one would question him too deeply about why he’d lost control of the car.
He would now be seen not only the leader in a crusade against those who would harm the United States, but a widower whose beloved companion had been murdered by those very subversives he had in his sights. The naysayers in the military and elsewhere would be silent now or risk the wrath of public opinion.
Hartman Drake took a deep breath and willed his body to calm. He scanned the trees on the side of the bank, wishing his mentor was there, to see how well he’d done. He thought of his youth and the man who had seen his genius and saved him from a life of starvation-a man who had taught him the one true way and brought him to America for a mission far greater than he’d comprehended at the time. Dr. Nazeer Badeeb, his longtime friend.
Their impossible plan was finally coming to pass. The president and vice president would not survive the evening. As the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives, Drake was poised to take the reins.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Laurel, Maryland
Julia Sanborn held her rhinestone-encrusted Coach purse under her arm. She pressed the key fob to unlock her car door with one hand while she talked to her sister on the cell phone with the other. The gray street outside her apartment was deserted. Her heavy heels echoed on the grimy pavement as she sashayed out from her second-story walk-up like she owned the world. Spits of rain clung in tiny droplets to the shimmering black of her pixie-cut hair.
The fob didn’t work, so she unlocked the Mitsubishi sedan with the key.
“I know, I know,” Sanborn yelled into the cell phone as if she was deaf. “I got bills to pay, you know. He’ll just have to, like, get that through his head or else I’ll show him I mean business…”
She tossed the handbag into the passenger seat and hiked up her short skirt to maneuver her legs in behind the wheel. “I know… I know…”
She stuck the key in the ignition and turned it, but nothing happened. She kept talking while she tried again. “Can you believe it? I mean, like, I have the pictures to prove it… No… Of course I’m naked in the pictures… Of course we are. Yeppers… I know, really… I’m tellin’ you, he’s, like, some kind of stud… No, you can’t see the pictures. I told you, I’m naked too…”
She turned the key. Again, nothing happened.
“Listen, sis, I’m gonna have to, like, call you back. Can you believe this? My damn car won’t start. Yeah, really, I’ll just get him to buy me a new one.”
Sanborn ended the call and put the phone on the seat beside her purse. She tried the key one more time. Not even a click. “Come on.” She smacked the steering wheel with both hands. “Why does the bad shit always have to happen to me?”
At that moment, the dark form of Mujaheed Beg rose up from the backseat and looped a thin twisted cord around the delicate skin of Sanborn’s throat.
“Because you are greedy, my dear,” he grunted as he fell backward. The cord crossed behind her neck, terminating in two hardwood handles he used to jerk it tight.
Sanborn’s eyes slammed wide in the rearview mirror. Gaudy fingernails clawed frantically at the biting twine.
Beg would have used the piano wire, but he knew from experience that such material would cut through the woman’s flesh like soft cheese. With so much yet to do, this was no time to find himself awash in blood inside the close confines of the car.
He nodded in satisfaction as Sanborn tried to honk the horn. Good for her. But he’d disabled that along with the battery. Her back arched. Feet pedaled against the floorboard, kicking blindly. Pinned back in her seat there was little she could do. Beg himself knew of no way to defend against such an attack-but he was smart enough to check the backseat before he got into a car.
The beauty of a garrote was the silence of its simplicity. There were no screams to raise the alarm. If applied correctly, by the time a startled victim opened her mouth, the unforgiving cord had already crushed the windpipe and pinched both carotid arteries. Her brain denied oxygen and blood, Sanborn fell unconscious in seconds. Beg held his grip for two full minutes, humming “Treat Me Nice” under his breath. Sweat from the exertion of the killing beaded along the dark lines of his forehead and dripped from the end of his nose.
Sanborn died with her eyes open, her once bright face purple and taut with terror.
Beg rolled the thin cord around the two grip sticks on either end and stuffed it back in the pocket of his loose jacket. He shoved the dead woman so she toppled over into the passenger seat, her arm trailing into the floorboard on top of a Wendy’s hamburger sack. Grabbing her purse so the incident would look like a robbery, he walked quickly down the shadowed street.
A block away he ducked down the alley behind a CVS drugstore. Earlier that day, while Sanborn had been away, he’d taken an envelope containing the illicit photos of her and Drake from under her mattress. In her purse, he found the thumb drive that was surely her backup. For a blackmailer, she was highly unsophisticated.
Beg snapped the thumb drive into an adapter on his smartphone and scrolled through the contents. He shook his head at the woman’s stupidity. The files weren’t even password protected. The metadata showed the photos had been printed twice-that accounted for the set mailed to Drake and the set he’d found hidden under her mattress.
He scrolled through the photos again, looking at each one carefully. He was glad he’d killed Sanborn without spending any time with her. She was a whore and he had no use for that sort of woman.
He took the thumb drive out of his phone and dropped it to the pavement, crushing it beneath his heel. His mind wandered to the jasmine scent of Veronica Garcia as he dialed Badeeb’s number. She was a woman he would soon spend some time with. His crooked mouth perked at the thought.
Badeeb picked up. “Peace be unto you,” he said. The sound of him exhaling a lungful of cigarette smoke fluttered on the other end of the phone.
“And to you,” Beg said, pressing on with business lest the doctor spend the next ten minutes on their greeting. “I took care of the problem with the photographer.” He was careful not to use Hartman Drake’s name on an open phone line.
There was a long pause. “Cleanly, I trust.”
Beg shook his head, sighing. “Of course,” he said. There was no truly clean way to kill another human being. “In any case, your man is free to pursue his goals without her interference.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
7th Fighter Squadron Langley Air Force Base, Virginia
T ara Doyle leaned against a flat, diesel-powered aircraft tug and watched the weapons being loaded onto her aircraft. She toyed with a crescent wrench while she sipped a can of Pepsi. It was against hangar protocol to drink soda this close to the aircraft, but the two airmen loading ordinance were more interested in stealing glances at her chest than anything she might be doing to bend the rules.
It was still hours before her flight, but she’d already donned her olive drab Nomex flight suit. Normally loose, it was known as a bag by those in the business. Tara had found one a size too small that showed off the round swell of her buttocks. A full-length zipper ran from the crotch to the neck. She unzipped it down to her belly button and tied the long sleeves around her slender waist to keep it up like a pair of pants. Her metal dog tags dangled on a chain over the chest of her skintight T-shirt, drawing attention to the fact that she’d worn no bra. She wanted the airmen’s focus anywhere but their job.
Tracy, a chubby kid with a mop of dark hair that pushed Air Force regulations, drove the weapons lift. He sat idling next to the aircraft, a load of bombs partially under the plane. The F-22 had to be loaded from the opposite side in order to clear the open bay door. Arlow stood beside his partner, scratching his buzz cut and pursing baby-face cheeks as he looked over
the paperwork.
Doyle dropped the wrench on the deck of the tug and walked over to sidle up next to him. Men reacted in one of two ways to such direct attention. Arlow didn’t disappoint her. He gulped, looking her direction, trying-and failing-to keep his eyes off her breasts.
She threw her head back to drain the last of her Pepsi. It exposed the delicate lines of her neck and tightened the shirt against her body. She let her left arm drape over the top of her head, exposing the small tuft of dark hair under her armpit. Her real mother had never thought to shave there and Tara vowed not to bow to the vain American custom. It had made her the object of derision during gym class growing up. Air Force flight surgeons raised surprised eyebrows every year during her physical, but never actually asked anything. She was happy to be an outcast. It made her remember what the Americans had done to her father and brother… and the way they’d defiled her mother before they’d cut her throat.
Whether or not the young airmen found an unshaven woman attractive, they were certain to find it exotic-and in her experience, that was all a man needed to become hooked like a fish. Tara gritted her teeth behind a tight smile. Her chest shuddered with a mix of excitement and revulsion.
“Something wrong, Airman?”
“Nope.” Arlow shook his head, blinking as if to clear something out of his eyes. “I… I mean… you’re goin’ out hot tonight… By that I mean your airplane, ma’am… I don’t mean you personally…”